Fire and Brimstone
by finaljoy
Summary: For a moment, the world is on end and she can't think and she can't breathe and she's not even sure if she's going to die.


_**AN I read this fic in the second person, and then like usual, I had to write something in the second person. But I can only do angst, pain and darkness, and Bane and Talia just fit that perfectly.**_

_you've gotta keep breathing, you've gotta keep breathing_

It's the only real thing you can hear, the thoughts echoing around in your head because your ears are shot and you can't really see straight. You try glancing to the right (_oops that was a mistake)_ and then you look to your left. You can see on your left, your left is safe. Except it tears your heart out.

He's laying there, on his back and his hands are clenching at odd moments, like his hands are spasming.

_breathe, breathe, no, don't breathe in blood, look now you're coughing_

You wonder what's wrong with him, wonder if it's his mask, if it's been ripped apart from the explosion. A sudden ringing springs into your ear and what little you could think before is gone, gone, you can't really even breathe because it _hurts_.

_is this what he has to deal with every day_

You start to wonder what even caused the explosion. One moment you had been in the car, armed with a gorgeous dark blue evening dress, while he was wrapped in the less lethal combat boots and long sleeve shirt. You had just been thinking how comfortable and warm it looked, and what you really wanted to do was wrap yourself up inside of it _(maybe there was a little bit too much champagne at the party) _and then he was suddenly shoving your outside of the car and then it was heat and glass and fire and pain and you ended up on the other side of the street.

You try to crawl towards him, you need to reach him, but your back stabs with pain the moment you move your arm. You guess that you landed on it when you fell out of the car and it scraped and bleeding, but it's nothing a few weeks won't fix.

_if you even have that long your lungs might drown before that_

Out of the corner of your eye, opposite of him, you can see someone moving (_no it was better when everything was swaying). _Their arm is badly burned, and just by seeing them you can smell the disgusting scent of burned skin, rubber and surprise. Part of the sclera of their right eye is entirely red (_knew the right was bad), _and all you can think about is the fact that they were actually a he, and that he had been your first friend upon reaching your father's safe haven in the deathly mountains. His hazel-blood-red eyes are big as scared as he stumbles towards you, shouting, shouting, whispering, trying to get you to understand. You want to say that you can't hear past the ringing and horror, but there's blood in the way.

_stop coughing! stop it stop it stop it okay coughing's better than puking_

It hardly surprises you that after everything, after having your entire world blown apart in the span of a second, you puke all of those gorgeously vapid tidbits of food you had eaten less than an hour before in front of you. And the champagne. That burns when it comes up, not to mention the blood.

The whisper of a leaf crunching reaches you past the ringing, and then the man, boy, really, a few feet away is wrenched back by what you guess is a bullet. It hits his shoulder, more to knock him down than kill him. You figure you're next.

_you better reach him, you better reach him or you've failed the only thing you've truly ever cared about_

You turn your head away from your burned friend, because you can't hope to help him. The man so large and so powerful and so pathetic on the ground a few feet away, however, is someone you can help.

It takes a lifetime, one long, hellish and bloody lifetime before you reach him. You can hear more, and you hurt more, but it's just aching, stabbing ears and bruising and a very scraped back and legs, so that's okay. You can hear the cracks of a gun somewhere, picking people off or keeping them down, and the screams and moans of people. You can also hear the vague hiss as the beautiful, pain saving gas escapes the mask. Enough of it has slipped out by now that you even feel better when you get close, can't feel all of the pain.

_maybe it's not so terrible being him._

He's watching you, his large, dark blue eyes seeing past your skin and into your soul. You want to reach out and brush his face, tell him it's okay in every one of the dozen languages you know, but your tears fall on his face and he closes his eyes.

Your hands tremble as you place them over his mask, rough and cold and safe. One of the tubes had been knocked open, causing the gas to escape. You put your finger over it, press it back closed. A bit of your blood falls on his wonderfully warm looking shirt (_well it belongs to both of you now), _falling from your mouth._  
_You realize it from where you bit your cheek and not where one of your organs exploded.

_well isn't that a bright side_

You have no idea how you're going to escape this, you need to escape this, you can't escape this, but you just look into his eyes and think about how nice they are because you can't do anything. You hate that feeling, but it's something that's been with you all of your life. You can't do anything, can't cause something to happen. You just come along with a patch to kind of sort of fix things half way afterwards. You never realized how much you hate yourself for it until now.

He puts his hand over yours, palm warm and lovely, not like the fire. You see someone stand up, run for cover. You look, see a woman pulling out a gun as she ducks behind a car. She is shouting something into her ear piece, saying something about anarchist attacks on the convoy you happened to join last second. The Prime Minister had been in the car just behind yours.

_who the hell wants to be an anarchist anymore, anyways_

Only one thing registers. In two minutes, backup would be there, the sniper would be taken out and you would be carefully taken to the hospital where you can pretend to be the innocent, empty headed victim who got caught by chance. But he can't. He's a freak that can never see the light of day, nor a hospital. He has to be taken somewhere else to recover.

_breathe, breathe, come on, breathe, breathe and be better, breathe and be healed, he better not leave you alone, no, don't_

It's the only real think as he closes his eyes, and you guess you thought it was a good idea, because then you black out, too.


End file.
